


Temptations

by jmtorres



Category: Highlander: The Series, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Origin Myths, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-09-11
Updated: 2003-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-01 12:30:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/356810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmtorres/pseuds/jmtorres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Methos tells Duncan the origin myth of the Immortals, YW style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Temptations

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Sex, murder, domestic violence, general badness of mythic proportions.

"In the dawn of days, when the world was young--"

"Are you in this story?"

"Heavens, no. We're talking about Neanderthals, MacLeod. Two hundred thousand years--this story's a good forty times as old as me."

"Immortals are Neanderthals?"

"Immortals are evolved from Neanderthals in much the same manner that modern _Homo sapiens_ are evolved from _Homo erectus._ You may be a throwback, though."

" _Hey._ Anyway, how can Immortals evolve, when we don't have children?"

"We don't have children, and yet pre-Immortals continue to show up on doorsteps... do you want to hear this story or not?"

"Oh, yes. Do go on, then."

"Very well. In the dawn of days, when the world was young--why are you laughing?"

"Why not just say 'Once upon a time' and have done with?"

"It's not a fairy tale. It's a _myth._ It has some essential truth to it. Are you done?"

"Yes. Yes, I'm done."

"In the dawn of days when the world was young, there a village in the mountains where there lived a thousand men and women peaceful harmony. They ate fruits and grains and legumes, and fermented just about everything--stop laughing, you--and spent their evenings dancing and making love, and generally had a nice, idyllic existence."

"So what happened?"

"They lived happily ever after."

"That's not much of a story!"

"Sorry, I seem to have skipped ahead."

"Well, skip back!"

"Skipping. Anyway, one day a traveller was passing through the mountains, and asked if he could spend the night in the village. The villagers agreed, and the traveller sat by their fires and ate their food and drank their wine--I believe it was fermented apples, that evening--and then he asked if he could not give them something in return for their hospitality."

"Nice gent."

"Not really, no. For this was the Lone Power, the trickster god, the devil, whatever you may wish to call him-- _you_ may wish to call him Ahriman, but anyway, his gift was death. Luckily, the Matriarch of the village saw immediately that the gift was simply a way for the Lone One to steal their souls, and refused it."

"And they lived happily ever after?"

"Ha. No. Or, not yet. The Lone Power asked if he could still stay the night in the village, and the Matriarch said that the hospitality offered him had never been contingent on what he could repay them with. He was still welcome, and would stay the night in the Matriarch's own household.

"Now, the Lone Power has, among his abilities, a talent for shapeshifting, and so he went to the Matriarch's sister in the guise of her own husband, and bedded her. Then, when the real husband came in, the Lone Power took the guise of the husband's dearest friend. The Matriarch's sister, having seen the change, realized whom she had actually slept with, and tried to tell her husband, but the husband was too enraged to listen, and chased the Lone One out of the household, screaming that he would kill him."

"If these people didn't have death--"

"They had it much as we have it, an impermanent thing. So it was like saying, 'I'll kick your arse' or the like, only the Lone Power meant to twist it to his own ends. The Lone Power led the husband into the woods, and lost him there, and there transformed again, this time into a fly. As a fly, he buzzed around the husband's head, saying, 'Your friend has gone back to the village, he has fled back to his own wife,' and in so saying, eventually guided the husband to his dearest friend's home. The husband called his dearest friend out, and challenged him to fight, and then launched such an attack that his dearest friend had little choice but to defend himself.

"As they fought, the husband's dearest friend asked the husband why, why he wanted to kill his own dearest friend. The husband answered, 'One woman for every man, and one man for every woman, this is the way of things!'"

"Isn't that a Beach Boys number?"

"Hm? That's 'Two girls for every boy,' I think--if that had been the sentiment, it wouldn't have been such a bloody problem, would it? Anyway, the husband succeeded in killing his dearest friend, and would have considered this satisfaction, but for the fly that was not a fly buzzing in his ear, saying, 'Cut off his head, take a trophy to put on a pike outside your home, to warn others away from your wife.'"

"Oh, he _didn't._ "

"He did. He decapitated his dearest friend, making his friend most permanently dead. But as soon as he did so, the fly landed on the corpse and began sucking its soul out. When he saw this, the husband remembered that his wife had claimed she had been tricked by the Lone Power's shapeshifting, and he realized that he had given the Lone Power exactly what it wanted. So he tried to take his dearest friend's soul into himself, battling with the Lone Power for the soul. He saved nearly half of the soul inside himself, and the Lone Power tore away nearly half of the soul to eat, and only the tiniest kernel of the soul escaped them both.

"This tiny kernel of soul fled into the womb of the Matriarch's sister--"

"Reincarnation?"

"Very good, MacLeod, have a gold star. Yes, in the old way of the universe, before entropic death had taken hold, when a person died--and they did sometimes, their bodies were not completely indestructible, so there was a failsafe to deal with accidental beheadings: that person would be reincarnated. However, the person was _supposed_ to be reincarnated with all of her or his memories, and memories of the husband's dearest friend had been swallowed up by the husband and the Lone Power. The tiny kernel of soul that escaped had no identity, no knowledge of who it had been, and so became as a true infant rather than an adult having to grow up in a new body.

"The Matriarch's sister knew she was with child almost instantly, since the condition was very rare and therefore rather noticeably abnormal to her. She tried to speak to the child to ask who it was, but the child was unable to answer her, lacking all memories of self and speech. She went to the Matriarch, who divined that it was the husband's dearest friend, or what was left of him. Because the husband had been so enraged as to kill his dearest friend once already, the Matriarch and her sister put the strongest protective spells they could on the child, that no further harm should befall it.

"Then the husband came home and said, 'O, wife, I have done a terrible thing. I have allowed our guest, the Lone Power, to deceive me as he deceived you, and I have killed my dearest friend.' The Matriarch's sister, seeing her husband's remorse, comforted him, saying, 'Your dearest friend will live again; even now I bear him in my womb.' But the husband did not believe her, because he had seen the Lone Power eat half of his dearest friend's soul, and knew he held the other half in himself. He said, 'I do not know what abomination you carry--I think it must be the Lone Power's own child! We cannot suffer it to live,' and with that, he began to beat his wife to make her miscarry."

"Oh, geez."

"Don't look so shocked, Mac, we've already established the guy was a grade A bastard. Or have you forgotten he killed his dearest friend?"

"Well, no, but, _geez._ "

"Possibly the fly was still buzzing around, hoping to get that last kernel of soul. I don't know, though, and in any case, it must have failed, because the protective spells the Matriarch and her sister had put on the child were so strong that even being expelled from its mother's womb so early was not enough to kill it. The child wasn't even big enough to tell from a clot of blood, but it lived. The blood was washed off in the river, and from there down to the sea, and the child swam in the sea's womb for three years before venturing to the land again. It was a girl-child, and the mortals who found her on the beach called her Selkie, and she grew up to marry the King of the Sea, but that is a tale for another day."

"Oh, don't go all Scheherazade on me."

"And they lived happily ever after?"

"Methos!"

"And if they are not dead, then they are living still."

"Technically true, I suppose..."

"Tautological, in fact."

"But what happened to the husband and the wife? The Matriarch's sister?"

"Oh. Well, I'm sure she divorced him or something."

"You don't know, do you?"

"The story doesn't say. But I wouldn't have put up with that kind of abuse. Maybe she took his head?"

"That's more like it."

"And she lived happily ever after, in homosexual union with the husband's dearest friend's widow."

"Oh, for heaven's sake..."

**Author's Note:**

> Also on [dreamwidth](http://jmtorres.dreamwidth.org/324484.html).


End file.
